


The Art of Vegan Mayonnaise

by uschickens



Category: Ten Inch Hero
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:23:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1624145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uschickens/pseuds/uschickens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Boaz became Priestly and learned to speak the language of the Native Californian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Vegan Mayonnaise

**Author's Note:**

> Written for CJ Marlowe

Priestly showed up at Tish's doorstep promptly at eight pm. He was still in his Banana Republic costume, but he'd switched back to his own boots and had put his studs back in. He was fairly sure the freaking button-down shirt was dark enough to hide the Iron Maiden t-shirt he was wearing underneath. He'd considered redying and spiking his hair, but he hadn't had time after work. (And, truth be told, he'd already bought flowers, and he didn't have any dye to match. Hey, shut up; they were _ironic_ flowers. He might not be entirely sure how this dating thing worked, but he was pretty sure it was a faux pas to show up with pink flowers and orange hair.)

He knocked, shave and a hair cut, and Tish opened it almost immediately, almost naked. He dropped the flowers, and when he bent to pick them up, he found himself at eye level with what he supposed were shorts, technically speaking. On his way back up, he passed eye level with something that might have started life as a t-shirt.

"Um. Hi?" He'd pictured this before, but now that the moment had arrived, he was somewhat at a loss. Don't get him wrong; he really did quite desperately want to sleep with Tish; it's just that he kind of wanted to do it multiple times. Over multiple days. And maybe eat breakfast with her the next morning. And maybe make out a little when their lunch breaks coincided. And maybe she would smile at him like she had when she'd told him her name, like there was a joke only the two of them knew. This...did not look like it was headed in that direction. This...looked like every story she'd told on late Saturday mornings, sleepy and satisfied and a little smug.

She grinned at him, and his heart did the same little funny clench it always did. "Hey. You're punctual."

"You're naked," he said. He could feel his eyes widening in oh-shititude even as he heard the words leave his mouth. This was not what he had planned. This was not suave. This was not a charming mix of debonair-devil-may-care and actually-a-nice-guy. This was Boaz-has-no-brain/mouth-filter-and-not-in-a-fun-way all over again.

***

_Middle school is hell for just about everyone, but when you're a barely athletic boy with stupidly long eyelashes and an unfortunately girly mouth, and your parents decided it would be really awesome to name you Boaz, "hell" doesn't even begin to describe it. His parents were awesome and supportive, but they were in no way cool, and there was really no way they could understand the depths of his pain. They wanted their weird names._

_Boaz muddled through as best he could. His parents extolled the virtues of nonviolence and using his brain rather than his fists, but what saved him most often was a) knowing shortcuts through the school and 2) running like a madman. Unfortunately, what got him into trouble most often was his complete and utter inability to think twice before opening his mouth._

_"Hey, cheesedick! Your mama wears combat boots and likes it!" never made much sense to him, but it was fun to say, and it made the numbnuts teasing him look as mad as he felt. It all went downhill from there, but he couldn't quite bring himself to regret it, even as he ran as fast as his legs would take him._

_He did himself no favors by joining show choir in the seventh grade, but Mrs. MacIntosh actually seemed to like him, and she let him play with the lights for their end-of-year show. He claimed it was all about the pyrotechnics, but secretly Boaz enjoyed the spectacle of the whole thing. He liked everybody looking at him in a nice way. He liked performing. He liked people wanting to listen to what he had to say (sing, whichever) without waiting to make fun of him afterwards. That, plus the knowledge of the basic workings of a sound board was pretty cool, too._

_By the time he hit high school, Boaz pretty much gave up on trying to give himself a nickname. B, Az-man, Snake (he saw Escape from New York at a very influential age) - none of them stuck when he'd been in the same school with the same kids since kindergarten. Knowing him since they were all five hadn't stopped Sorensen and all the rest from suddenly deciding somewhere in October during sixth grade that Boaz was a stupid name, and everyone knows that what happens in middle school doesn't stay in middle school. It stays with you for the rest of your life._

_***_

Miraculously, Tish laughed, and he didn't think she was laughing at him. Much. "Technically, no, but if it's been that long, honey, we may have to go over a few things first. Come on in; I may even have a manual around here somewhere."

Priestly relaxed. Dating was still fucked up, but _this_ he could do. _This_ they'd been doing since the first time Trucker had said, "Priestly, this is Tish, our cashier extraordinaire. Tish, this is Priestly, the new short order. Try not to crush his soul too much."

"Does it have pictures? I like pictures. With those little scientific labels. Bring it with you; we can horrify the people at the next table." He let her take his hand and pull him inside.

She smiled again, but it wasn't his smile. It was the same one she'd given Tad and John and Mark and Douchebag #427 and all the rest. "Mmm, I was thinking we could get take-out later. Something of the non-sandwich variety."

Priestly would never acknowledge the sound he made, a sound that, if it had been made by anyone else, he would have called "a panicked little whimper of joy." Instead, he plowed on. "Only if you mean much later. You do not want to know what I had to do to get tonight's reservations."

(By which he meant, "I called up my buddy who's a sous-chef, agreed to help him out at his next banquet, even if it means wearing a monkey suit and serving, plus rewire his fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck 'sound system' so he can actually use it, and he's getting us a table and a set menu, and all I have to do is tip enough not to piss off the server, please god don't let me look like a tool.")

"And while I deeply enjoy your, um-" he grappled for words "-that-" he waved in her direction, "I don't know if it meets the 'no shirt no shoes no service' thing."

Tish's face relaxed into a grin. "My 'that'? My _'that'_? Honey, it's a shirt and shorts. Unless you mean my-"

"That's not a shirt!" Priestly yelped, cutting her off. "Those are shoulderpads with delusions of grandeur!"

Tish laughed. "So come take it off me."

"But, I...reservations," Priestly faltered.

She took his hand again. "Honey, I know you. You know me. We don't need to go make awkward small talk over chips and salsa. Let's, you know." She tilted her head. "Skip the bullshit." She tugged at his hand, but he resisted.

"What if I, you know, kinda like the bullshit?" He wished he had respiked his hair; it might have made him feel a little less hang-dog. Desperate. Something. "What if I wanna see you in that dress you wore to Jen's birthday dinner again? What if I wanna make awkward small talk? What if it's over some sort of fancy-ass ceviche and tiny mushrooms? "

"You know what ceviche is?" Tish sounded dubious, but she was smiling the right smile again.

"Hey, it might not be much, but I _do_ cook for a living. Maybe you've sampled my wares before?"

"Yeah, well, tofurkey on rye with vegan mayonnaise isn't exactly high dining."

Priestly snorted. "Vegan mayonnaise is an _art_ , and I am its master." Sobering, he said quickly, before he lost his nerve, "But seriously. I have reservations. They're really nice. You're really nice. You wanna do this?"

Tish bit her lip and considered him. "You are a strange man, Boaz Priestly. I'm a sure thing, and you still want to wine and dine me. For as weird as you look, you're kind of old fashioned."

He grinned, aiming for suave and debonair and getting rakishly, unexpectedly charming. "What can I say? Sweetheart, I contain multitudes."

***

_After high school, Boaz gave college, well, the old college try. He went far enough away from home and stayed just long enough to do four things: 1) firmly establish his identity as Priestly-no-first-name-necessary, 2) get a job at the local diner as a busboy and stay long enough to work up to second grill, 3) discover his love for that whole college radio dj thing, and 4) learn that he loved a roof over his head and regular meals more than he loved a full-time radio job. So he dropped out of school, worked full-time at the diner for the rest of spring semester, and spent the summer as a roadie/bus chef/merch flunky for a ska band on the Warped Tour._

_Later, he would lament (loudly and frequently) that he wasn't five years older or younger. He missed the legendary college stations of the late eighties and early nineties, even as he imprinted on them while in high school, and he was long gone from campus by the time stations started streaming over the internet and getting a second wind. "They were the desert years, man, and I wandered through them - naked, alone, and thirsty for good music," was his mournful cry._

_Still, his three semesters of high-speed campus internet during the Age of Napster did not go to waste. His parents had been generous with their graduation gift, and eight gigs seemed preposterously huge at the time, but Priestly did his damnedest to fill them. Between alt.music.*, Napster and all her progeny, and the crazy vaults of the campus station, he was a man among riches._

_He started with the Trainspotting soundtrack (because there was a brief time when he was determined to be Ewan McGregor when he grew up, except without the whole giving-up-beer-in-order-to-look-like-a-heroin-addict thing), which gave him Iggy Pop, which led him to Iggy Stooge, which led him to the Stooges, which branched off just like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure novels, one path leading to Lou Reed, another to Siouxie and the Banshees, and a particularly sparkly path leading Bowie-wards. From there, it just kept spinning further and further out._

_He spent a solid week wallowing in hair bands (he wasn't gonna take it anymore, no no no), followed by a monthlong infatuation with sixties Issues Rock. About halfway through his second semester, he went through a Beatles phase, much to his aggressively cutting edge station manager's chagrin, straight through from In Spite of All the Danger to Real Love. ("I'm getting my foundations; fuck off.") On the ten year anniversary of Nevermind, he made it a point to collect every song he'd taped off the radio when he'd first discovered grunge._

_And thus was born the very beginnings of Priestly's Stupidly Huge And Kind Of Pointlessly Eclectic Music Collection, so named by the girlfriend he broke up with when he ditched Asheville for the second time and didn't stop wandering until he ended up in Santa Cruz, looking for a good used cd store and a restaurant in need of a short-order cook._

***

"How did I not know you have a podcast?" Tish said over the remains of the entree (salmon with a strawberry-chipotle glaze and chili-garlic sauce, the recipe for which Priestly was totally browbeating Scott into giving him, and not just because it made Tish make noises he thought he'd forfeited (for the moment) earlier in the evening). "I mean, it sounds like you spend hours on it every week, but you never talk about it. At least not that I can remember."

Priestly shrugged, rolling his fork through the rice. "Same reason none of us knew about Jen's little Warcraft addiction until last week, I guess. Some things are for work talk, and some things...aren't." They'd gotten the awkward small talk out of the way over the appetizers (they were out of the tiny mushrooms, but the ceviche was excellent, and Priestly was sure that the oyster shooters were Scott's attempt at humor), and somewhere over the salads, they remembered that they'd already been living in each other's pocket and relaxed into conversation.

Priestly still wasn't entirely sure, but he suspected that he was currently living out an Actual, Grown-Up Date. And it didn't suck. Not with Tish across the table from him, radiant in the blue dress he remembered from Jen's birthday, actually talking _with_ him and not _at_ him.

Tish scoffed. "Oh, c'mon. You guys have known the details of every move I've made, every thought I've had, every guy I've," she waved her hand, "for the last year. I thought we talked about _everything._ "

"How's your mom doing these days?" Priestly asked, trying to make the question as soft as possible.

She glanced down and away. "Point. Okay. But my mom and your podcast are two totally different things."

"Yeah. And no." He shrugged; it made sense to him. "Some things are for public consumption, and some things aren't. Doesn't matter why they are that way, just that they are."

Tish opened her mouth to say something else, but the server arrived to clear their plates and offer coffee. They drifted back to easier conversation over dessert - Piper's deeply fucked up yet surprisingly functional family situation, whether Trucker would have beaten up Priestly if they'd gone to high school together, what songs would be better if Freddie Mercury were still around to cover them - but Tish had a thoughtful look that even chocolate mousse couldn't shake.

During their coffee refill, Tish said suddenly, "I'm saving up to go back to school because my mom really wants to see me graduate. It was kind of why I left the first time - I was only there because she wanted me to be, and that wasn't a good enough reason for me to stick around. Now it is. And now I'm afraid I won't get there fast enough for her to see me."

Priestly sat for a long moment, not saying anything. His mother would want him to say, "Thank you for sharing with me; our souls are now closer than ever." His father would want him to say, "Good for you. Was that really so hard?"

But finally he just said, "So what are you gonna study?"

Tish looked at him, surprised, then laughed, bright and happy. "Only you, Priestly. Only you," she said, before launching into her clearly-often-thought-about debate between nursing and business.

After Priestly tipped generously (and got a salacious wink from Scott as they passed the kitchen), they walked back to his car, Tish's hand tucked into the crook of his arm. It almost felt like one of those old movies his mom used to watch; Priestly resisted the urge to break into dance.

"So what else?" Tish asked. "What else've you got that isn't for work people? You're a closet dj; you actually know something about cooking, what? Me, I love Nora Roberts, but my favorite book that I read for school was _Ulysses_."

Priestly stopped in his tracks. "That's it; date's over. I'm not certain I can be seen in public with someone so clearly not right in the head."

Tish laughed again and slid her arm around his waist. "And here I never knew you had such strong opinions about Joyce."

"Not Joyce," he said. " _The Dubliners_ was okay. But _Ulysses_? Frickin' waste of time."

"So what did you like? Or hate the least? I mean, we all know about your five tattoos and six piercing, but I wanna know what you didn't throw across the room when you had to read it for class."

Priestly made his best thinking face, then said, "Actually it's fourteen, eight, and _A Tale of Two Cities_."

That time it was Tish who stopped dead. "Fourteen? You have fourteen tattoos?

He did a swift recount - neck, arm, wrist, other arm, shoulder, side, side, leg, ass (okay, that one was embarrassing), chest, stomach, back, back, and back. Yep. Fourteen. "Yep. Fourteen. What?"

" _Where_?" Tish sounded...intrigued.

Priestly grinned. "Wanna see?"

***

_When Boaz got his first tattoo, about six months after his eighteenth birthday and just before high school graduation, his parents were tragically disappointed. His mother actually cried._

_"My boy, my boy, have we taught you nothing?" she said, clutching his hand. "Did you see his books beforehand, did you make him draw in front of you, did you even look in the mirror to check the placement before you let him near you with a needle?"_

_He looked sheepish._

_"Boaz!" his father yelled. "Do you mean to tell me that he didn't even show you a template on you first? If you're that foolish, you deserve a crooked tattoo."_

_"Why didn't you come to us? We would've taken you to Uncle Fred's. It could have been our graduation gift to you. He would have done right by you. You remember, he did the lovely scrollwork on Martha's sleeve." His mother dabbed at her eyes._

_Like he said - his parents were awesome and supportive, but they were not cool._

_They were right, though. The ankh on his hip was a little bit off-center and kind of stumpy and uneven. After the awesomeness of simply having a tattoo had worn off, he began to privately consider that he might have made the slightest mistake. Uncle Fred was not his real uncle, but he was a real artist. Mystical Markings, Boaz's less-than-fortunate choice, was perhaps the tattooing equivalent of a Piercing Pagoda. For his twenty-first birthday, his parents paid for Fred to cover up Boaz's youthful indiscretions with a very fine set of flames arching up his hips and up his ribs._

_"My boy has racing stripes," his mother said fondly. His father just beamed._

_Okay. Maybe they were a little cool._

***

Tish ran her fingers from hip to arm. "You have racing stripes," she murmured, grinning a little. He didn't think he'd ever get tired of seeing that, but he winced.

"This might not be the best time to say that sort of thing. That's what my mom calls them."

He didn't think he'd ever get tired of watching her breasts bounce like that as she laughed, either. "One day you're going to have to tell me more about your family. They sound almost as, uh, interesting as you."

"One day." He hooked a leg between hers and rolled them over. "Just not, you know. Right now."

***

_Boaz was kind of scrawny, kind of girly, kind of geeky, kind of weird, and more than kind of insecure. Priestly was all those things, but he also had loud hair, loud makeup, a loud mouth, and enough brashness to cover up most of the insecurity. Is it any wonder that Boaz didn't get laid until he managed to convince everyone that he was Priestly?_

_Priestly was not unfamiliar with the Ways Of Women (and, well, college was a time of many experiments, but Priestly really, genuinely, really liked girls), and everyone got laid on Warped, but - in all honesty - he didn't get laid nearly as often as he liked. Or pretended to._

_There was the girl on his floor that he met on the way to the shower his first week in the dorm, and it still seemed like magic that she looked at him like he might be kinda cool, that she had no idea he'd gotten his pants stuck in his locker twice in tenth grade._

_There was the girl in his English class that he saw for almost two months, before they realized that the sex wasn't good enough to justify putting up with each other. There was the occasional girl at his friends' gigs, and there was one memorable night with the late night station dj right before she graduated, but college was not the bacchanal he'd kind of been hoping for._

_Somewhere after his first summer on Warped but before his first apartment in Asheville, probably some time during his stint as a sound tech and fry cook in Memphis, Priestly went from "you know, girly-pretty to man-pretty" (according to Jeff in Minneapolis, one of Priestly's former dungeon masters, who helped him move into his apartment in Asheville and then stayed for two and a half months on his couch). However, no matter how many of his friends told him this, no matter how many girls gave him sideways, approving glances, Priestly never really believed it. If a girl with tattoos up to there and piercings down to there sidled up to him at a concert, he figured she liked his hair, or his shirt, or his really bitchin' muttonchops._

_He had two girlfriends of note: an Australian girl living in Portland for the same summer he was there, a barista/songwriter with purple hair and a voice like Joni Mitchell, and Michelle in Asheville the second time around, who taught him all he could ever want to know about motherboards but only owned twelve cds. He should have known it would never last._

_Above and beyond his interactions with actual, physically present human beings, Priestly had the soul of an adventurer and endless curiosity, even (especially?) when it came to sexual matters. If the internet had been good to his music collection, it was fucking revolutionary for his porn collection. He never actually wrote it down, but he had a list of things he wanted to try one day. You know. When he met the right girl._

_("Priestly, you man-pretty son of a bitch, you are a closet porn romantic," Jeff informed him one night, after an unfortunate amount of Natty Light. Priestly was forced to agree with him.)_

_Priestly could talk to anyone, anywhere, but when it came to the language of love, Girl long remained a foreign tongue to him. He felt lucky to sometimes meet a girl who spoke Freak as a second language, Priestly's native tongue when it came to romance. Tish threw him for a loop; she looked nothing like the girls he'd ever thought he'd have a chance with before, but she seemed to speak an unfamiliar dialect of Native Californian. He thought it might be close enough to Freak that they could understand each other. One day._

***

"So, um."

"Um?"

It was a Tuesday; they'd both had the night off, and they'd put it to good use. Her sundress was somewhere in the kitchen, his kilt on the lampshade. They were curled up on Priestly's couch, taking advantage of his roommates' beach crawl surfing trip ("Like a pub crawl, only with boards! We're not stopping till we hit Baja! Don't get too much spunk on the furniture!"). Tish was curled into him, idly fingering the starburst around his left nipple.

"You know that was awesome, right? Like, totally awesome. I am a man with no complaints over here."

She gave him the we-have-a-secret smile. "What have I told you about flattery? Unnecessary but always appreciated."

He grinned back, still a little nervous. "I just wanted to make that really, totally clear up front. Because. Um."

"Um? We're back to the um?"

"Um," he said, hoping third time was the charm, just plowing straight through, "I was wondering what you might think about some, um, creativity."

She quirked an eyebrow at him. "What do you mean by creativity? Are we talking slap your ass and wear a diaper creativity, or Tad-style creativity?"

"No Tad, Chad, or diapers, I promise," he said. "I just. Uh. I kind of have some things? That I'd like to try?"

Tish sat up and grinned down at him. "Boaz Moonshadow Priestly, do you have a list? Do we need to have a talk about porn and reality again?"

"It's not a list!" he protested. "More, you know. Suggestions. Guidelines. That I've been collecting along the way."

"And you haven't found a girl kinky enough to try them out on yet?" There was still a hint of uneasiness in Tish's voice.

"No!" Priestly's refusal was immediate; his clarification less so. "I just hadn't. Um. Found. You know. Someone I wanted to. You know. Um."

Tish placed a hand on his chest. "Stop before you go completely non-verbal. And breathe a little. And talk to me." She slid back down in his arms, and Priestly wondered, not for the first time in the last four months, how Short Pants Boaz had gotten this lucky.

***

_Tish promised him two blowjobs in a public place, one night of Naughty Nursing, and three new toys of his choice, even the weird blasphemous ones from Divine Interventions if that's what he really wanted, if he would bring back his best Banana Republic impression just long enough to accompany her to her final round of scholarship interviews. "They're close-minded tools with no sense of style or individuality, but they're close-minded tools with big checkbooks," she said, resting her head on his knee._

_Priestly hid a grin. He would have said yes even without the incentives, but they'd learned they both liked it when she asked so prettily. "But it's right after Trucker and Zo's...whateveritis on the beach. It just wouldn't be right for me to show up looking like that."_

_"We'll photoshop something inappropriate on your shirt afterwards," Tish promised._

_"It still feels kind of funny," he trailed off when she grinned at him._

_"Already taken care of. Just get here a little early to get ready."_

_It still felt kind of funny, but that was mostly because he wasn't used to silk rubbing up against his bits. The lace was a little scratchy, but he kind of liked it. What he liked better, though, was the heat in Tish's eyes as she slid the panties up his legs. What he liked best of all was her we-have-a-secret smile that was all she ever gave him these days._

 


End file.
